SONGS AND SOUNDS

BIG IN CAMBODIA: TURN AWAY, RUN AWAY

ALEX EMMES

October 2, 2026

On a first trip to Cambodia, a dealer in vintage motor scooters keeps hearing a record that belongs, in memory, to a very different place. Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” follows the journey from a car radio to a village bar, through a hotel lobby and all the way to the airport. It brings back leaving home, someone in Corpus Christi, and a time when British pop seemed to know things parents preferred not to discuss. Everyone else appears to regard it as current affairs. The band is still filling concert venues. Perhaps the music has kept up better than the traveler.

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The first time I heard it in Cambodia, we were passing a truck loaded with mattresses. My driver turned up the car radio. There was static, then the thin, descending keyboard figure, then the pulse beneath it. I knew what the voice would sound like before it arrived.

“Smalltown Boy.” Bronski Beat. 1984.

This was my first trip to Cambodia. Usually I went to Vietnam, bought old motor scooters, shipped them to Texas, refurbished them if needed, and sold them in Austin, where I now lived. I restored the machines. The customers supplied the youth. I had made that journey often enough to have a preferred hotel, a freight agent, men who sent me photographs of machines they thought I could sell. This time one of them had given me a contact across the border. I added a week for Cambodia.

In Vietnam I knew what I was looking for. Here I was still learning what to notice.

That morning we were driving toward a temple well beyond the usual circuit. The road had narrowed. My driver rested two fingers against the wheel and sang along with the record, missing most of the words but getting the melody right. I watched the mattresses sway ahead of us.

I had heard the song often enough over the years but had become able to hear it without remembering who I had been when I first listened.

The synthesizers were accused of being cold. The singer was doing enough feeling for everyone.

The opening is sufficient. A few notes repeated, with a small space around them. They have the unsettled quality of a thought that has occurred before and will occur again. The rhythm promises movement. The melody already knows something movement will not resolve.

Then Jimmy Somerville begins.

I have never been able to hear that voice as an ordinary voice. It is high, exposed, almost alarmingly clear. There is little between the singer and the listener. Even through the static, even in a car overtaking a truck, it seems addressed to someone who has been waiting to be addressed.

In 1985 I was nineteen and living in Corpus Christi. For me this was the big city. I had come from a town where a person could ask whose son you were and obtain, in your answer, most of the information they required.

My parents thought I would do better if I were more like the people around me. My mother wanted me to talk to someone. My father wanted to know who had given me the idea. They did not tell me to leave. My mother insisted on this afterward. I left of my own accord. She was correct.

I found work selling tires and rented a room above a garage. The air conditioner emptied into a coffee can. I went to bars where nobody knew my father.

The man I met was called David. He was twenty-six and worked at a hotel. He had a record player and bought British imports. I learned to recognize the larger sleeves of the twelve-inch singles before I understood why he wanted them.

We listened to “Smalltown Boy” sitting on the floor. Through the balcony door came the smell of asphalt still warm after sunset. “You know this one,” he said. I nodded. I had heard it before. I had not heard it sitting beside a man whose knee touched mine.

The song describes leaving. A young gay man departs a place in which the people who ought to love him cannot give him the love he needs. There is loneliness, there is persecution, there is the practical business of taking what you can carry. The story could have been made into a ballad. It could have asked the listener to sit quietly and sympathize. Instead, it is a dance record.

That fact had seemed natural at nineteen. Later I understood how much depended on it. The rhythm gives the listener something to do with the distress. You can move while listening. You can be surrounded by other people who are moving. The boy in the song is alone, but the record can fill a room.

David had a record player. The British supplied the words.

In the apartment, I wanted to play it again and again. I was embarrassed to ask. When it ended, David got up and moved the needle back.

At the temple I found myself humming the keyboard line. I had come to look at stone, to consider time on a scale larger than my own. Instead, I sat in the shade remembering the space between the notes of a record made in 1984. I had prepared myself for the survival of ancient things. The survival of something from my own lifetime seemed less reasonable.

Bronski Beat had been three openly gay men: Somerville, Steve Bronski, Larry Steinbachek. They appeared in British pop at a moment when the synthesizer had become capable of carrying almost any emotional proposition. Loneliness could be sequenced. Desire could be made repetitive. A machine could keep time while a human voice lost its composure.

Somerville is the person one remembers first. Listening again, I began to attend to the work of Bronski and Steinbachek. The repeated figure does not compete with the vocal melody. Sounds arrive, withdraw, return. For a record that produces such an immediate response, it is remarkably patient. In an old interview I had read, Steinbachek described the beginnings of “Smalltown Boy”: an attempt to cover the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant,” an octave sequence, a change of speed, a melody that began becoming something else. Punk was somewhere inside the dance record, altered almost beyond recognition.

To an American teenager, British pop seemed to come from a place where the terms of being a man were under negotiation. Boy George was on television. Marc Almond had sung “Tainted Love.” The Eurythmics had made Annie Lennox’s appearance something you could argue about at the breakfast table. Frankie Goes to Hollywood turned provocation into spectacle. There seemed to be an entire industry devoted to making my parents uncomfortable. I knew almost nothing about the Britain producing these records.

We also played the Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Depeche Mode. Their records made the synthesizer sound by turns intimate, solemn, playful, severe. I could hear the same family of instruments and very different ideas about what a pop song might disclose. On US radio, these differences sometimes disappeared into the category of British music. In David’s apartment, we listened to them one record at a time.

The machines were often described as cold. I heard the concentration of someone trying to remain composed. The regular beat made the voice’s vulnerability more audible. Somerville could stretch a phrase above the rhythm, but the rhythm continued. It seemed to know the way out even when the singer could only describe why he had to go.

The visitor requested evidence. This was becoming tiresome for the locals.

Bronski Beat looked comparatively ordinary. Somerville’s hair was cropped short. His face could have belonged to someone standing beside you at a bus stop. The voice was extraordinary, and the position from which he sang was explicit. You did not need to interpret a costume. You needed to listen.

“Smalltown Boy” was released in 1984, when Reagan and Thatcher were in power, and AIDS was becoming part of the public vocabulary through fear and accusation. The record entered that atmosphere with a story about a boy and his home. It was modest in its narrative means. It asked what happened at a kitchen table, in a locker room, on a train. These were places in which a life could become impossible without attracting anyone else’s attention.

The album was called The Age of Consent. Even the title required a listener to consider that a private life had public conditions. In a record shop it looked like an album title; taken home, it became a question. What was permitted, to whom, and by whom? At nineteen I was more interested in playing the record than formulating the question. The question reached me anyway.

When we stopped for a beer that afternoon, the song was playing again. This was a bar at the edge of a village, with a television showing football with the sound turned off, and a fan that clicked on every turn. Outside, a motorcycle carried a plastic crate full of dead chickens secured with yellow cord. Inside, Somerville was already singing.

I asked my driver whether it was the same radio station. He said no. A young man behind the counter was playing music from his phone.

The second hearing was different. In the car I had heard the voice. Here I heard the bass, the determined continuation underneath the plea. The record does not surrender its pace when the emotion becomes painful. That is part of its authority. It can admit unhappiness without making unhappiness the only available condition.

The vocal moves between telling the boy’s story and calling toward him. The song keeps returning to the impulse to leave. Heard once, it is advice. Heard again, it sounds urgent. By then the body has begun following the beat. The record carries its listener through a departure without pretending to show what happens afterward.

A woman came out of the back carrying plates. She paused beside the counter and sang a little of the melody. The young man smiled at her. They spoke, and she went outside.

I asked whether people liked Bronski Beat here.

“Number one,” he said.

I assumed he meant among the songs on his phone.

“The band,” he said. “Biggest in Cambodia.”

He opened a beer. My driver nodded, as if this were something I should have known before arriving.

“You listen to them?” the young man asked.

“I used to.”

“Why did you stop?”

I had no answer ready. I was accustomed to being asked whether I could get parts for something this old.

“Old people, young people.” He showed me the playlist. There was “Why?” There was a version of “I Feel Love.” Then “Smalltown Boy” again, in a longer version.

The longer version interested me. A dance mix allows the music to occupy time beyond what the story requires. You remain inside its movement. The vocal can retreat and leave the machines working, then return with the force of something remembered unexpectedly. The production, by Mike Thorne, gives the voice room without leaving it unsupported. It is surrounded by motion, but you can hear its solitude.

A place you leave, then pay to have printed on a shirt.

Bronski Beat’s follow-up, “Why?”, was more confrontational. It demanded an account of the contempt directed at men who loved other men. On the album, the two records suggested different responses to the same conditions. One boy gets on a train. Another voice turns toward the people watching and asks them to explain themselves. At nineteen I needed the train first.

I remembered David turning up “I Feel Love,” remembered how little instruction my body required. Bronski Beat carried that appetite for movement into songs whose subjects might have seemed to forbid it. The British electronics belonged to a larger conversation with American dance music, with voices such as Donna Summer’s and Sylvester’s, with rooms where people could be audible together.

I had not known the term hi-NRG when I first danced to these records. I knew the sensation of being carried forward faster than I could reconsider. There were evenings when this was all I wanted from music. Listening in Cambodia, I could hear that desire still inside the record. Somerville sounded wounded, but he also sounded willing to be heard. I had spent enough of my youth trying to lower my voice.

I wanted to ask whether the young man understood the song, by which I meant whether he understood it as I did. I asked a different question.

“Why is it so popular?” I asked instead.

“My mother,” he said, pointing toward the doorway. “She always played.”

He named an uncle who had sold cassettes, a wedding band, a cousin who posted videos. Then he pointed to a poster beside the television. I had taken it for an advertisement for beer. There was a beer on it, but above the logo, in English, were the words BRONSKI BEAT. Below them were dates and the names of three cities.

“They come every year,” my driver said.

He had gone twice. His wife had gone three times. The young man behind the counter had tickets for the following week. I did not understand what he was saying and did not ask further. Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek had died long ago, and Somerville left the band forty years ago. Were they talking about tribute bands? I never found out.

I looked from one to the other. The young man was going to the concert. My driver was recommending a temple. Both seemed to regard my confusion as unnecessary.

That evening, in the hotel lobby, I heard the opening a third time.

A receptionist was working at a computer. The song was low enough to be mistaken for part of the air conditioning until the voice emerged.

I had come prepared for the survival of ancient things. Nobody had warned me about British pop.

The receptionist recognized the band’s name immediately. His father liked them. His younger sister did too. He had taken both to the last concert, which had sold out before he could get a ticket for his girlfriend. He spoke of this as a problem with tickets. I was still treating it as a problem with history.

“Are they really the biggest band here?” I asked.

He looked surprised that I needed to ask.

He showed me the tour announcement on his phone. There were photographs of an enormous crowd, a stage under white lights, people holding their phones above their heads. He scrolled to a video. Thousands of people were singing the keyboard melody before the singer began.

In Austin I might have heard the record at an ’80s night. Here the band could fill a field.

I asked how this had happened. He mentioned imported cassettes and radio programs, older brothers. Everyone had an account of who had played the music first. Nobody supplied a date on which the country had agreed to keep it.

“People like the voice,” he said finally.

Bronski Beat had become Cambodia’s biggest band and remained so. None of the people I knew at home had mentioned this. They were quite good at telling me what was over.

My friend Chris had once described arriving at a small inn while trekking in Nepal and hearing Modern Talking. The German duo, he learned, was enormously popular there. Chris had walked for three days. Modern Talking was already there.

What I had mistaken for three coincidences was an ordinary day’s exposure to the country’s favorite music. The receptionist found the original “Smalltown Boy” video and turned the phone toward me. I watched Somerville on the train. I watched the swimming pool, the attraction, the violence, the return home. The mother reaches toward him. The father cannot. Then there are the friends, and the possibility of leaving together. I had remembered the video as unrelievedly sad. On that small screen I noticed how much companionship it contained.

The video supplied rooms, faces, a train. The record could travel without them. I had heard Corpus Christi inside it. My driver heard something that made him turn up the radio. Thousands of people here knew its opening well enough to sing the part written for a synthesizer.

Ready for export to Austin, where its age would become an additional charge.

Upstairs, I called my wife in Austin. I told her that Bronski Beat was the biggest band in Cambodia.

“Impressive,” she replied.

“They tour here. There’s a concert next week.”

She asked whether I was going. I said I was thinking about it. Then I told her about listening on David’s floor.

“You’ve told me that,” she said gently.

“I know.”

I had always described the evening as something that happened between David and me. I had said less about the record. Now I could hear how much it had permitted. Someone else had already said enough.

My wife asked whether I had bought any scooters. I said yes, two, subject to the paperwork. There was a customer in Austin who wanted a gray one. I would have to remove the blue paint. The other was pearl-pink and in exceptionally good condition. I would describe it as having character, although its principal attraction was the absence of damage.

After we hung up, I played “Smalltown Boy” on my phone. The speaker was poor. The keyboard sounded smaller, the bass almost vanished, and still the voice held. On the desk was the tour leaflet the receptionist had given me. I checked the date against my flight. I could stay another three days. The scooters would ship without me.

I thought of the crowd singing before the singer had begun. In Corpus Christi, David had lifted the needle and taken us back to the opening. In Cambodia, thousands of people already knew where to come in.

A few days later, at the airport, I heard it again. I was waiting for coffee. Behind the counter, a woman was putting lids on paper cups. The keyboard figure came through a speaker somewhere above the refrigerated sandwiches. She sang along while wiping a spill from the counter. This time I did not ask where the music came from. I had the shipping confirmation for the scooters. My passport was in my shirt pocket.

Turn away, run away. Boarding group two.

Across the room, a man in a suit tapped two fingers against the handle of his suitcase. A child watched an airplane through the glass. Somerville’s voice rose over the coffee machine, still unmistakable, and the bass continued beneath it. I could hear the room above the garage, David’s apartment, the road beside the truck. The woman behind the counter called out an order number.

For a moment an announcement obscured the music. When it ended, the record was still playing. I had spent a week asking why they were still listening to it. At the airport, I began to wonder why I had stopped.

Alex Emmes was born in Seadrift, Texas, trained as a mechanic, and began importing vintage motor scooters from Vietnam in the 1990s. She lives in Austin with her wife, an assistant attorney general for Texas, and their two children. She earns her living persuading people that something forty years old is exactly what they need. Her wife generally asks to see the paperwork.

Cover image: Three Cambodian cities. One Texan is still asking whether anyone is sure.